She was ignored—­she was a nobody in her own home—­everybody knew it and talked of it.  She wasn’t jealous—­oh no!—­she was simply miserable!  ’Oh, I daresay you can no more help it than I can.  You, of course, are twenty times more use here than I am.  I don’t dispute that.  But I am the daughter of the house after all, and it is a little hard to be so shelved—­so absolutely put in the background!—­as I am—­’

‘Don’t I consult you whenever I can? haven’t I done my best to—­’ interrupted Elizabeth, only to be interrupted in her turn.

—­’to persuade father to let me do things?  Yes, that’s just it!—­you persuade father, you manage everything.  It’s just that that’s intolerable!’

And flushed with passion, extraordinarily handsome, Pamela stood tremulously silent, her eyes fixed on Elizabeth.  Elizabeth, too, was silent for a moment.  Then she said with steady emphasis: 

’Of course there can only be one end to this.  I can’t possibly stay here.’

‘Oh, very well, go!’ cried Pamela.  ’Go, and tell father that I’ve made you.  But if you do, neither you nor he will see me again for a good while.’

‘What do you mean?’

’What I say.  If you suppose that I’m going to stay on here to bear the brunt of father’s temper after he knows that I’ve made you throw up, you’re entirely mistaken.’

‘Then what do you propose?’

‘I don’t know what I propose,’ said Pamela, shaking from head to foot, ’but if you say a word to father about it I shall simply disappear.  I shall be able to earn my own living somehow.’

The two confronted each other.

’And you really think I can go on after this as if nothing had happened?’ said Elizabeth, in a low voice.

Pangs of remorse were seizing on Pamela, but she stifled them.

‘There’s a way out!’ she said presently, her colour coming and going.  ’I’ll go and stay with Margaret in town for a bit.  Why should there be any fuss?  She’s asked me often to help with her war-workroom and the canteen.  Father won’t mind.  He doesn’t care in the least what I do!  And nobody will think it a bit odd—­if you and I don’t talk.’

Elizabeth turned away.  The touch of scorn in her bearing was not lost on Pamela.

’And if I refuse to stay on, without saying or doing anything—­to put myself right—­you threaten to run away?’

‘I do—­I mean it,’ said Pamela firmly.  She had not only hardened again under the sting of that contempt she detected in Elizabeth, but there was rising up in her a sudden and rapturous vision of London:—­Arthur at the War Office—­herself on open ground—­no longer interfered with and over-shadowed.  He would come to see her—­take her out, perhaps, sometimes to an exhibition, or for a walk.  The suggestion of going to Margaret had been made on the spur of the moment without after-thought.  She was now wedded to it, divining in it a hundred possibilities.